ASUS A7N266e & WCIII

[RossGr]

I have a ASUS A7N266E, that is the Nforce 420D chipset with a 1GHz Duron CPU, it has been running seemily flawlessly for about 5 months now. We recently bought a copy of WCIII which has been giving this system fits, missing sounds and system restarts. WCIII runs fine on my other systems, a 400MHz Celeron/TNT2M64 a 450MHz PIII/TNT2M64 and a 1.2GHzTbird/GF2gts system. All have 256MB of memory and plenty of HD space.

The Nforce system has only a single 256MB stick of Fry's Generic DDR so when this game started causing problems I got an addtional 128MB stick from Frys to populate the second bank, thus finally getting the full memory bandwidth. But to my dismay the system would not boot to Windows (98se) with the new memory stick. Then when I tried the 128MB stick all by itself the system refused to complete the boot process and apparently trashed the MBR. So after flashing the BIOS to the latest from ASUS a clean install of Windows and the latest Nforce drivers and a fresh install of the Game, the problems presist. I have checked the WCIII web site but there is no mention of dificulties with this hardware. Is anyone here aware of any issues, or have additional information to add?

BTW, I installed the 256MB of Fry's DDR from the NForce system into my Shuttle AG31 and could not boot to windows. I did not try the 256MB of Crucial from the Shuttle board in the Nforce, it seems that the generic memory is borderline, I am surprised that the Nforce will run it and the Shuttle will not.

Ideas where to go next?

 

[yodayoda]

dude, i think the answer is pretty obvious: bad memory. if you have a stick of memory that doesn't even work in one motherboard, it is probably barely hanging on in the nForce board. any stress, like WC3, will throw it over the edge and crash the system. throwing more sh*t memory at the problem isn't the answer either. time to brake down, return that generic fry's stuff as defective, and get some quality Crucial, Mushkin, Kingston, etc memory. doesn't need to be the best, just quality PC2100 stuff.

 

[RossGr]

Yeah, I think you are correct. I ordered some more Crucial memory today, unfortunately I have had the 256Mb stick of Frys generic for to long, I may have to eat it. Ebay?

 

[RanDum72]

what kind of warranty did the Fry's DDR have? One year?

 

[RossGr]

I think that they have a 30 day return policy for instore credit.

What ever, I recieved and installed a pair of 128MB sticks of Crucial 2100 DDR today, I managed to play about 5 min before it froze. The motherboard sensor is reading about 47 under load, that should not be excessive. I am pretty much at wits end with this.

 

[Gandalf90125]

Any progress in getting the problem solved?

Are you able to play other games OK with this system?

I've heard about possible problems with nForce's sound, so you might try disabling it and seeing if that does the trick or possibly updating the chipset drivers.

 

[RanDum72]

Flash the board to the latest BIOS and install the latest nforce drivers (which includes video, sound, chipset). And you are still using win98SE??

 

[car3on]

I dunno about the whole memory thing, check out my thread "Graphics hell on earth" I have had exactly the same probs with ALL 3d games, took it back and they did replace the ram, but it still seems to like to crash alot, for instance, gunlok restarts windows xp when I exit it, and wolfenstein and warcraft 3 both ran for about 1-2mins before lockin, then restarting the system. Diablo however, direct draw lovely that it is, ran flawlessly, except for having to turn the sound acceleration down to basic to get the sound to work properly.
I still have to grind it a bit, but I think the problem is still there, I even went so far as to disable the lan, gameport and digital out support, and then reinstall windows to try to fix it. I think it may be that it is just a really cr3p chipset.